Casting Off (32 page)

Melodrama over, we went to the Oasis club for some dinner and to use the wifi to book flights for Moe and me. The club was much busier than usual and full of young, drunk English men. They were
the crew of a British Navy ship that had been working in the area and had just docked. Many of the officers were falling-down drunk. Moe, Gemma and I being the only young (well, Gemma was) women
around, we were very much in demand. But when the officers heard what we were doing in Salalah they got very angry with us for even daring to venture into these waters in the first place.

‘When we left Sri Lanka it was a totally different situation from the one we found ourselves in ten days later,’ I tried to explain to one, a posh blond in a pink shirt who under
different circumstances might have been the man of my dreams. ‘The pirates weren’t targeting cruising yachts. And they couldn’t even reach this far out from Somalia.’

The lieutenant was having none of it and went on and on about how foolish we were. It was OK for him: even though his vessel wasn’t there to fight pirates – it was a survey ship
– it had six armed Royal Marines on board to offer protection.

The universe manifested Tyrone a new crew member, in the form of ex-Royal Marine Geoff, who had been crewing for one of the Blue Water Rally boats,
Fai Tira
. The two owners
couldn’t afford to ship her to Turkey but – one of the skippers, Pete, informed me, with tears of gratitude in his eyes – the other rally members had chipped in to pay the bill.
Geoff wanted to complete his circumnavigation. It couldn’t have worked out better.

Gillaroo
,
Crazy Bear
,
Albatross
and a few other boats formed a council of war and had serious meetings in our cockpit. They issued code names for each to use over the
VHF and spoke to the local agent and fixer, Mo, a huge black guy in a white dishdasha robe, about the possibility of an escort to Yemeni waters. At US$8000 per day per yacht, hiring an armed
mercenary was out of the question. The promised escort seemed to be the best option until, the night before departure, demands came in for ludicrous amounts of money. The convoy decided to go it
alone.

Moe and I thought it best to make ourselves scarce during these negotiations, especially since some people seemed to have taken our ‘abandonment’ personally. We helped out in little
ways – went to the supermarket and provisioned the boat for Tyrone and Geoff, did some cleaning – and spent the rest of our time exploring Salalah with a few other younger crew who were
scattered among various boats in the harbour.

Of all the places I visited on my travels, Oman was my least favourite. It wasn’t only the barren and dusty beige ugliness of the place – think high piles of rock everywhere –
it was also the attitude towards women. By this point I’d spent a fair amount of time in Muslim countries but this was something else. Oman has a small population and takes in a lot of expat
workers, European, African and Indian, so the Omanis are used to seeing white Westerners around. But the local men treated us with a lot of disrespect, from taxi drivers ripping us off to a
policeman trying to sexually assault one of the female crew to shopkeepers ignoring us and only talking to our male friends, even when we addressed them directly.

The convoy’s departure date was two days before our flights so Moe and I were homeless for two nights. Sarah, the lovely woman who owned the yacht
Mystery
with her husband
Richard, kindly offered us beds. She and Richard were staying at a hotel with their three children for a couple of days before sending their kids back to family in the UK.
Mystery
was a
revelation of what a cruising boat could be like – air-conditioning, a washing machine, stand-up showers, multiple toilets that flushed with a single touch of a button. Pure luxury.

Saying goodbye to Tyrone was just as hard as telling him I wanted to leave. The danger lay, heavy and unspoken of, between us. He told me he was switching off the tracker, just in case pirates
were monitoring the website. It meant I had no way of knowing where
Gillaroo
was or if she and her skipper and crew were safe. He slipped lines in the early hours of the morning, while Moe
and I were sleeping off our hangovers on
Mystery
. For our last two days in Salalah, the gaps that the seven convoy boats had left in the harbour were a constant reminder that our friends
were out there in hostile waters, gambling with their lives.

It was weeks before I heard from him and I worked hard at reining in my overactive imagination. They hadn’t pulled into Aden, he said when he could eventually email, because they had had a
rough sea state, which would have made it trickier for pirates to board them, so they carried on sailing. It was actually a good job I was no longer with them because they would have needed to
break away from the convoy so I could pick up my flight in Aden. After all the worry, they saw no pirates or suspicious boats. They didn’t stop in Eritrea, either, because there was a problem
with yachts being impounded, so they kept going to Sudan. They were having a great time there, he said, and had helped out at a local regatta, where Tyrone had to keep pulling Sudanese men who
couldn’t swim out of the water. Soon they would continue their journey up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean to Spain, where
Gillaroo
had started her
voyage three years ago. I was so happy to hear they were fine.

Moe and I flew to Muscat together, then went our separate ways, she to Abu Dhabi to visit a friend and me to Heathrow. After what we’d been through, just saying ‘bye’ and
‘see you later’ at the airport seemed inadequate but I couldn’t find anything more fitting to say without seeming cheesy. I think she understood, anyway.

It was difficult not to feel sad and slightly regretful about the way this part of my adventure had ended. Circumstances had taken things out of my control, so it wasn’t quite what I had
planned.
But wasn’t relinquishing that control one of the reasons for going away in the first place?
I reasoned as I accepted a stick of chewing gum from the burkha-clad woman next
to me on my flight home.
Learning to accept life and whatever happened, instead of always trying to force things into the shape I wanted them to be? Was Aaron’s ‘universe
manifesting’ theory so ludicrous after all?
Look at
Gillaroo
turning up in Borneo at the time I needed to leave
Kingdom
, at our bumping into Guy again the moment we
arrived in Thailand, at Tyrone always managing to find new crew when it seemed hopeless. And at my being offered a job on a superyacht, seemingly out of the blue. OK, so I had written out my list
of options but I had not done anything towards making them happen. And, in a few weeks’ time, option 1 would come true and I would be a deckhand in Italy.
It’s weird how things turn
out
, I thought, as the credits for
Mission Impossible 3
scrolled up the tiny screen and the woman next to me snored lightly. And it didn’t even cross my mind that the universe
might be sneakily working away behind the scenes, quietly manifesting another one of those options from my list without my knowledge.

I
just about made out someone shouting my name over the din of the electric sander.

‘Em-ma?’

‘Si?’ I asked, not taking my eyes off the door I was grinding back to bare metal.

‘Caffè?’

‘No, grazie, Imran,’ I replied, working the edge of the rotating sanding plate right up to the label on the door, using all of the muscles in my arm to control it, despite the heavy
vibrations it was sending up to my shoulders. ‘Tè?’

‘Oh, sì. Sorry. I forget,’ a mix of Indian-and Italian-accented bad English came back. ‘You no like caffè.’

I finished sanding the top corner of the door and switched the machine off, waiting for the disk to stop rotating before I placed it down on the teak deck. Pulling the safety goggles off my
eyes, I rubbed a damp forearm across my dusty face and peeled off the blue latex gloves to go and fetch my tea.

This was my new life as superyacht crew, the option 1 that I had chosen, and it was about as far removed from my old life back in London as it was possible to imagine. Instead of a 12-hour day
sat hunched over a computer screen in a dark and dingy office in London, I worked eight hours in a boatyard. I had swapped an hour-long tube commute for a 15-minute ride in a Fiat 500 through the
narrow, medieval lanes of Castellamare di Stabia, English for Italian and journalism for manual labour. My work clothes consisted of a pair of men’s shorts, a lemon T-shirt bleached white by
the sun and an old pair of running shoes that were swiftly being covered in paint, anti-rust chemicals and grime. I had no electronic swipe card to pass through office security; instead to get into
my place of work I climbed four metres up a ladder, holding on with just one hand while in the other I hauled up whatever tools I needed for that day’s task. And my crewmates – Carlo
the captain, Imran the cook and Daniela the hostess – had become my new colleagues, my family and my friends, as they were the only people I knew in this country where I stuck out like a
long, pale, English thumb.

Carlo, the captain who had sent me the recruiting email back in the Andamans, had been waiting for me at Rome Ciampino airport a few weeks earlier. I knew it was me he was looking for because he
held a sign in his hands with ‘Miss Bamford’ written on it in giant capitals. It was a good job he was holding a sign; I wouldn’t have picked him out as a superyacht captain from
the small crowd of people. I was expecting a tall, suave and rich-looking man, not this small, elfin creature with a heart-shaped face wearing sunglasses indoors. His hair was steel grey and
close-cropped and he was dressed in a polo shirt, gilet, chinos and deck shoes – the boaty uniform around the world. I towered over him in my flat shoes as I shook his hand.

The rest of the crew were tiny, too. Imran, who I met the next day after Carlo drove me from Rome to Naples in the crew car – suitably compact and painted red, white and green like the
Italian flag – was even smaller. With a bird-like frame, he had razor-sharp cheekbones made more prominent by the way a lifetime of chain-smoking had withered the rest of the skin on his
face. An Indian living in Italy for nearly two decades, he had married a much younger wife and brought her and his three daughters to live in Rome. In a bid to keep up with his young family he Just
for Men-ed his greys and kept in shape: when he got too hot he had a habit of pulling his T-shirt up, like a teenage boy apeing what he has seen in a rap video, to expose a curiously toned and
hairless six-pack.

The hostess, Daniela, arrived a few days after me. Just shy of 40, she had a brunette Mary Quant bob, big brown eyes and a small Roman nose, from which, at night, emerged the most incongruous
and startlingly loud snores I have ever heard. We shared a room and, later, a cabin and sometimes it was so bad, in spite of the different types of earplugs I tried, that I would move into the
living room or try to sleep on the deck – but I could still hear her through either the walls or several inches of teak cladding.

So here we were, the four motley crew of
Panacea
, grinding, drilling, polishing, scrubbing, screwing, nailing, sanding and varnishing on a daily basis, trying to get the boat ready for
a summer season of charter work. It was a steep learning curve: in the six weeks I worked in the boatyard (where Daniela and I were the only women and I was the only foreigner – well, I
suppose technically Imran was a foreigner too but he spoke the language and his 18 years had given him an Italian temperament), I sanded, feroxed and painted the bilges and lockers, stretched out,
sanded and re-painted nearly 400 metres of anchor chain, filed and painted two 100kg anchors, scrubbed fenders and dressed them in protective socks like furry blue condoms, mixed paints, learned
the ratios of resins to hardeners, sanded the deck, serviced the winches, changed the engine oil. The bilges became my office and I climbed, squeezed and contorted myself into inconceivably small
spaces on a daily basis, usually with a paintbrush or electric drill in hand. The best job was polishing the chrome fittings to a satisfyingly bright gleam outside in the sunshine. The worst was
crouching on my haunches in the main bilge, shielding myself with one hand to protect my face from white-hot sparks sent flying as the captain welded a new pump to the black water tank.

All of it, in its novelty, I found immensely satisfying and interesting. I was learning new things every day, managing to complete tasks I would never have thought I was capable of, and I was
using both my brain and my body for once. Every day I would go back to the apartment physically shattered but buzzing.

‘Emma contenta?’ Salvatore, an electrician who spoke not a word of English, asked Carlo one day, when we were about halfway through our yard work.

I understood enough Italian by this point to reply, although it was one of the few times I could pick out what Salvatore was saying. His Neapolitan dialect was so strong that usually his words
all melded into one long, garrulous and high-pitched lump to my ear.